this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Aren't all protests performance? In the sense that they are made for others to see and to bring awareness? What else are they for? It's not for debate or promoting alternatives, it's too messy for that.
Real world protest disrupt the daily life of the city (or country) making them impossible to ignore for politics and media. The government can respond with discussion or with violence but they have to respond.
Social media protest however can be completely ignored.
Real world protest on a meaningful scale is extremely dependent on population density both of individual cities and of the country in general.
In the United States we're extremely spread out, even if we have some urban areas with incredibly high population density. The result is a situation where wide-scale protest logistics really aren't in our favor. Even if you mobilized all of New England's protest-inclined leftists to organize around one city, it's hardly the numbers needed to shut anything down. We can't just all go outside and produce nation-wide mobs in our major cities.
Look at Occupy Wallstreet. They had pretty substantial support and there were busloads of people from all over the country going to New York. But in the end it wasn't enough to create substantial change.
Strikes have been effective because they mobilize the actual workforce that's looking for a result, and are inherently disruptive to the thing they're trying to change. Their demands end up being addressed because they crank up the immediate urgency of addressing them.
We need that. Targeted action that is actually effective on a wide scale. I don't really know precisely what that looks like, but I think a good first step is the kind of action we see around remote work. People literally will quit over it and go elsewhere. Companies have done so much to leech profits out of their employment models that they've reduced any incentive toward long term loyalty.
They really don't have much bargaining power right now, so people can dictate the terms a bit more. Individual decisions regarding how and when companies get to buy your labor or your creative output, as well as which companies you support financially, may well be closer to an actual path through the muck.
Outside agitation can also be incredibly useful. An outside actor in contact with people inside a corporate entity have an opportunity to speak out without the chance, legal or otherwise, of employer retaliation. Again, targeted and largely individual action.
Whatever the solution is, I suspect it'll look a lot more like that if it's going to challenge the status quo in the United States.
It is supposed to be a disruption of society or a show of force to convince political leaders to change policy.